If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Is it legal to store IP addresses into a database?

I thought to a site where visitors can vote elements without need to register.. For avoid that an user could vote more than once, i thought to keep trace of his vote according to his ip address.
Yes i know that ip addresses are dynamic and an user can disconnect and reconnect for vote a secon time, but it's not a problem for me.

The principal question is: is it legal to store ip addresses into the database?

IP addresses can change as you rightly say, mine changes each time I log in to the internet via my dongle.

Therefore using IP addresses to determine if someone has voted or not will be very unreliable and in your case you would be best off needing a users IP address + email address and also the users browser information.

That would mean that the user would have to have multiple email accounts, web browsers and IP addresses.

This would also allow users who share an internet account to vote.

Although unreliable you could use cookies on the local users machine to assist keeping in mind that they can be expired and in the EU these days the legal requirement is to display an opt in notice is required.

Data Protection Act only comes in to play if you store personal information or information that could identify an individuals personal data in a public domain. So if you had the users name and email address and IP address, that wouldn't be counted, however if you had the users name, address, medical information then you would need to employ privacy protocols by encrypting and also registering as a data processor with your local agency that deals with such things, like here in the UK it would be the ICO.

If you wanted to use a voting system that would guarantee your visitor is unique then you would need to implement the use of JAVA (NOT Javascript) to get the users connection information from the users machine.

You could then have a voting console that gathers the users connection information and vote that then posts to your PHP script / database.

That is the only way I can think that you could effectively gather MAC ID's for a connection to then bar subsequent votes from that users machine.

This has an added problem that most computers are shared between users.

IP addresses can change as you rightly say, mine changes each time I log in to the internet via my dongle.

Therefore using IP addresses to determine if someone has voted or not will be very unreliable and in your case you would be best off needing a users IP address + email address and also the users browser information.

That would mean that the user would have to have multiple email accounts, web browsers and IP addresses.

This would also allow users who share an internet account to vote.

Although unreliable you could use cookies on the local users machine to assist keeping in mind that they can be expired and in the EU these days the legal requirement is to display an opt in notice is required.

request the email informatio coul be a sort of registration form, and i want to avoid it
So i could use IP control + local cookie
I don't see how getting browser and OS information can identify an user

You could have two people at one IP address, one is a Linux build using Opera and another is a Windows Build using FireFox.

This can be solved with combo check of IP + cookie, or maybe only with cookie

The problem of using mail is not the question about personal data, is that i want to make the service most accessible as possibile, without steps such registration or any sort of identification.. I know that there are so many workaround using the check of IP or cookie based, but it's not matter for what i want to do